and his
officers.

ARRIVAL AT CORFU

He was not long in discovering what mischief the stolen despatch had
done, and may well have suspected from the first in his inner mind that
his efforts to undo it would bear little fruit. The morning after his
arrival the ten members for Corfu came to him in a body with a petition
to the Queen denouncing the plan of making their island a British
colony, and praying for union with Greece. The municipality followed
suit in the evening. The whole sequel was in keeping. Mr. Gladstone with
Young's approval made a speech to the senate, in which he threw over the
despatch, severed his mission wholly from any purpose or object in the
way of annexation, and dwelt much upon a circular addressed by the
foreign office in London to all its ministers abroad disclaiming any
designs of that kind. He held levees, he called upon the archbishop, he
received senators and representatives, and everywhere he held the same
emphatic language. He soon saw enough to convince him of the harm done
to British credit and influence by the severities in Cephalonia; by the
small regard and frequent contempt shown by many Englishmen for the
religion of the people for whose government they were responsible; by
the diatribes in the London press against the Ionians as brigands,
pirates, and barbarians; and by the absence in high commissioners and
others 'of tact, good sense, and good feeling in the sense in which it
is least common in England, the sense namely in which it includes a
disposition to enter into and up to a certain point sympathise with,
those who differ with us in race, language, and creed.' Perhaps his
penetrating eye early discovered to him that forty years of bad rule had
so embittered feeling, that even without the stolen despatch, he had
little chance.

He made a cruise round the islands. His visit shook him a good deal with
respect to two of the points--Corfu and Ithaca--on which it has been
customary to dwell as proving Homer's precise local knowledge. The rain
poured in torrents for most of the time, but it cleared up for a space
to reveal the loveliness of Ithaca. In the island of Ulysses and
Penelope he danced at a ball given in his honour. In Cephalonia he was
received by a tumultuous mob of a thousand persons, whom neither the
drenching rains nor the unexpected manner of his approach across the
hills could baffle. They greeted him with incessant cries for union with